Question- How has Arundhati Roy projected the illicit or incestuous relations in 'The God of Small Things'?

Answer - 

The God of Small Things deals with the revolutionary idea of illicit relations. It sends shock waves to an overage Indian reader as it is still considered to be a taboo amongst the Indian societies but the western society is absolutely normal according to its sensibility. Roy has been severly criticized for her portrayal of sexual aspect which look absurd and they would have been easily done away with. Their detailed description drew a lot of flok for her.

Ammu is shown to be a young widow neglected and cared less by everybody. She has no one to look up to, no one to lend her a shoulder to cry on. She has her emotional and physical instincts unquenched, and when she meets Velutha he unquestionably offers himself to her. There she feels that whatever the hermoil which was inside her, she is able to release it.

Ammu's relations with Velutha are viewed with a lot of contempt by the people around her because they term it to be illicit, unethical, immoral and sinful whereas when Chacko is seen flirting with a lowly woman his musings are termed as 'Man's needs'. In a biased and male dominated society where Chacko gets away with everything and Ammu gets severely punished for every 'sin' she commits.

The sexual portrayal or the senses in the book are no doubt in abundance and have be critisized. But it seems Roy sees it to be a universal thing rather than a very private or personal matter. There is no doubt that there are places where they look absurd when they are narrated by the eyes of a seven year old kid and this type of delineation also looks unethical in the Indian eyes where the people are deeply cultural and traditional. But for the accidental culture it is on the contrary. Like D.H. Lawrence's revolutionary work 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. Roy has voiced sexual sentiment of many people.

Roy has deliberately described some of these scenes because they leave a deep impression on the minds of the innocent characters in the novel which goes on to shape their personality when they grow up. For example, the experience Estha undergo at Abhilash Talkies gives him nightmares throughout his life. These abnormal experiences later develop into abnormalities of the characters.

Here, it is to apparent from her work that Roy has interwoven these incident to bring out the deep rooted psyche of the characters without which they would appear empty. She has delineated such scenes only to suit the framework of the plot or the sentiment of the characters:

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